would he dilate into secret history! His countryman, Pennant himself, in particular, could not be more eloquent than he in relation to old and new London-the site of old theatres, churches, streets gone to decay-where Rosamond's Pond stood-the Mulberry gardens-and the Conduit in Cheap-with many a pleasant anecdote, derived from paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures which Hogarth has immortalised in his picture of Noon, the worthy descendants of those heroic confessors, who, flying to this country, from the wrath of Louis the Fourteenth and his dragoons, kept alive the flame of pure religion in the sheltering obscurities of Hoglane, and the vicinity of the Seven Dials! of glittering attainments: and it was worth them all together. You insulted none with it; but, while you wore it as a piece of defensive armour only, no insult likewise could reach you through it. Decus et solamen. Of quite another stamp was the then accountant, John Tipp. He neither pretended to high blood, nor, in good truth, cared one fig about the matter. He "thought an accountant the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest accountant in it." Yet John was not without his hobby. The fiddle relieved his vacant hours. He sang, certainly, with other notes than to the Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abominably. His fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle-street, which, without anyDeputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame. thing very substantial appended to them, He had the air and stoop of a nobleman. were enough to enlarge a man's notions of You would have taken him for one, had you himself that lived in them, (I know not who met him in one of the passages leading to is the occupier of them now,) resounded Westminster-hall. By stoop, I mean that fortnightly to the notes of a concert of "sweet gentle bending of the body forwards, which, breasts," as our ancestors would have called in great men, must be supposed to be the them, culled from club-rooms and orchestras effect of an habitual condescending atten--chorus-singers-first and second violontion to the applications of their inferiors. cellos-double-basses--and clarionets-who While he held you in converse, you felt ate his cold mutton, and drank his punch, and strained to the height in the colloquy. The praised his ear. He sate like Lord Midas conference over, you were at leisure to smile among them. But at the desk Tipp was quite at the comparative insignificance of the pre- another sort of creature. Thence all ideas, tensions which had just awed you. His that were purely ornamental, were banished. intellect was of the shallowest order. It did You could not speak of anything romantic not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind without rebuke. Politics were excluded. A was in its original state of white paper. A newspaper was thought too refined and sucking-babe might have posed him. What abstracted. The whole duty of man conwas it then? Was he rich? Alas, no! sisted in writing off dividend warrants. The Thomas Tame was very poor. Both he and striking of the annual balance in the comhis wife looked outwardly gentlefolks, when I pany's books (which, perhaps, differed from fear all was not well at all times within. She the balance of last year in the sum of had a neat meagre person, which it was 25l. 1s. 6d.) occupied his days and nights for evident she had not sinned in over-pamper- a month previous. Not that Tip was blind ing; but in its veins was noble blood. She to the deadness of things (as they call them traced her descent, by some labyrinth of in the city) in his beloved house, or did not · relationship, which I never thoroughly under- sigh for a return of the old stirring days stood, much less can explain with any when South-Sea hopes were young-(he was heraldic certainty at this time of day, -to indeed equal to the wielding of any the most the illustrious, but unfortunate house of intricate accounts of the most flourishing Derwentwater. This was the secret of company in these or those days):-but to a Thomas's stoop. This was the thought- genuine accountant the difference of proceeds the sentiment-the bright solitary star of is as nothing. The fractional farthing is as your lives,-ye mild and happy pair,-which dear to his heart as the thousands which cheered you in the night of intellect, and in stand before it. He is the true actor, who, the obscurity of your station! This was to whether his part be a prince or a peasant, you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead must act it with like intensity. With Tipp form was everything. His life was formal. and Rockingham, and Howe, and Burgoyne, His actions seemed ruled with a ruler. His and Clinton, and the war which ended in pen was not less erring than his heart. He the tearing from Great Britain her rebellious made the best executor in the world; he colonies, and Keppel, and Wilkes, and was plagued with incessant executorships Sawbridge, and Bull, and Dunning, and accordingly, which excited his spleen and Pratt, and Richmond, — and such small soothed his vanity in equal ratios. He would politics. swear (for Tipp swore) at the little orphans, A little less facetious, and a great deal whose rights he would guard with a tenacity more obstreperous, was fine rattling, rattlelike the grasp of the dying hand, that com-headed Plumer. He was descended,—not mended their interests to his protection. in a right line, reader, (for his lineal pretenWith all this there was about him a sort of sions, like his personal, favoured a little of timidity (his few enemies used to give it a the sinister bend,) from the Plumers of worse name)—a something which, in reve- Hertfordshire. So tradition gave him out; rence to the dead, we will place, if you please, a little on this side of the heroic. Nature certainly had been pleased to endow John Tipp with a sufficient measure of the principle of self-preservation. There is a cowardice which we do not despise, because it has nothing base or treacherous in its elements; it betrays itself, not you: it is mere temperament; the absence of the romantic and the enterprising; it sees a lion in the way, and will not, with Fortinbras, "greatly find quarrel in a straw," when some supposed honour is at stake. Tipp never mounted the box of a stage-coach in his life; or leaned against the rails of a balcony; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet; or looked down a precipice; or let off a gun; or went upon a water-party; or would willingly let you go, if he could have helped it: neither was it recorded of him, that for lucre, or for intimidation, he ever forsook friend or principle. Whom next shall we summon from the dusty dead, in whom common qualities become uncommon? Can I forget thee, Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters, the author, of the South-Sea House? who never enteredst thy office in a morning, or quittedst it in mid-day—(what didst thou in an office ?)—without some quirk that left a sting! Thy gibes and thy jokes are now extinct, or survive but in two forgotten volumes, which I had the good fortune to rescue from a stall in Barbican, not three days ago, and found thee terse, fresh, epigrammatic, as alive. Thy wit is a little gone by in these fastidious days-thy topics are staled by the "new-born gauds" of the time :-but great thou used to be in Public Ledgers, and in Chronicles, upon Chatham, and Shelburne, and certain family features not a little It is Not so sweetly sang Plumer as thou sangest, mild, child-like, pastoral M—; a flute's breathing less divinely whispering than thy Arcadian melodies, when, in tones worthy of Arden, thou didst chant that song sung by Amiens to the banished Duke, which proclaims the winter wind more lenient than for a man to be ungrateful. Thy sire was old surly M―, the unapproachable churchwarden of Bishopsgate. He knew not what he did, when he begat thee, like spring, gentle offspring of blustering winter:-only unfortunate in thy ending, which should have been mild, conciliatory, swan-like. Much remains to sing. Many fantastic shapes rise up, but they must be mine in private :-already I have fooled the reader to the top of his bent ;-else could I omit that strange creature Woollett, who existed in - - like trying the question, and bought litigations? Reader, what if I have been playing with and still stranger, inimitable, solemn thee all this while ?-peradventure the very Hepworth, from whose gravity Newton names, which I have summoned up before might have deduced the law of gravitation. thee, are fantastic — insubstantial How profoundly would he nib a pen with what deliberation would he wet a Greece:-wafer! But it is time to close-night's wheels are rattling fast over me-it is proper to have done with this solemn mockery. Henry Pimpernel, and old John Naps of Be satisfied that something answering to them has had a being. Their importance is from the past. OXFORD IN THE VACATION. CASTING a preparatory glance at the bottom' the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight disof this article-as the wary connoisseur in sertation.-It feels its promotion. prints, with cursory eye (which, while it So that you see, upon the whole, the literary reads, seems as though it read not), never fails to consult the quis sculpsit in the corner, before he pronounces some rare piece to be a Vivares, or a Woollet-methinks I hear you exclaim, reader, Who is Elia? Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half-forgotten humours of some old clerks defunct, in an old house of business, long since gone to decay, doubtless you have already set me down in your mind as one of the self-same college—a votary of the desk-a notched and cropt scrivener one that sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill. dignity of Elia is very little, if at all, compromised in the condescension. Not that, in my anxious detail of the many commodities incidental to the life of a public office, I would be thought blind to certain flaws, which a cunning carper might be able to pick in this Joseph's vest. And here I must have leave, in the fulness of my soul, to regret the abolition, and doing-away-with altogether, of those consolatory interstices and sprinklings of freedom, through the four seasons,—the red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days. There was Paul, and Stephen, and Barnabas as Andrew and John, men famous in old times we were used to keep all their days holy long back as I was at school at Christ's. I remember their effigies, by the same token,, in the old Basket Prayer Book. There hung Peter in his uneasy posture- -holy Bartlemy in the troublesome act of flaying, after the famous Marsyas by Spagnoletti.—I honoured them all, and could almost have wept Well, I do agnize something of the sort. I confess that it is my humour, my fancy-in the fore-part of the day, when the mind of your man of letters requires some relaxation -(and none better than such as at first sight seems most abhorrent from his beloved studies)—to while away some good hours of my time in the contemplation of indigos, cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise. In the first place and then it sends you home with such in- the defalcation of Iscariot-so much did we creased appetite to your books * not to say, that your outside sheets, and waste wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, most kindly and naturally, the impression of sonnets, epigrams, essays-so that the very parings of a counting-house are, in some sort, the settings up of an author. The enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among the cart-rucks of figures and ciphers, frisks and curvets so at its ease over love to keep holy memories sacred:-only methought I a little grudged at the coalition of the better Jude with Simon-clubbing (as it were) their sanctities together, to make up one poor gaudy-day between them-as an economy unworthy of the dispensation. These were bright visitations in a scholar's and a clerk's life-" far off their coming shone."- I was as good as an almanac in those days. I could have told you such a saint's day falls out next week, or the week after. Peradventure the Epiphany, by some periodical infelicity, would, once in six years, merge in a Sabbath. Now am I little better than one of the profane. Let me not be thought to arraign the wisdom of my civil superiors, who have judged the further observation of these holy tides to be papistical, superstitious. Only in a custom of such long standing, methinks, if their Holinesses the Bishops had, in decency, been first sounded -but I am wading out of my depths. I am not the man to decide the limits of civil and ecclesiastical authority- -I am plain Elia-no Selden, nor Archbishop Usherthough at present in the thick of their books, here in the heart of learning, under the shadow of the mighty Bodley. caves of kitchens, kitchen fireplaces, cordial recesses; ovens whose first pies were baked four centuries ago; and spits which have cooked for Chaucer! Not the meanest minister among the dishes but is hallowed to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes forth a Manciple. Antiquity thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, art everything! When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity-then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing! * What were thy dark ages? Surely the sun rose as brightly then as now, and man got him to his work in the morning. Why is it we can never hear mention of them without an accompanying feeling, as though a palpable obscure had dimmed the face of things, and that our ancestors wandered to and fro groping! Above all thy rarities, old Oxenford, what do most arride and solace me, are thy repositories of mouldering learning, thy shelves— I can here play the gentleman, enact the student. To such a one as myself, who has been defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of academic institution, nowhere is so pleasant, to while away a few idle weeks at, as one or other of the Universities. Their vacation, too, at this time of the year, falls in so pat with ours. Here I can take my walks unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree or standing I please. I seem admitted ad eundem. I fetch up past opportunities. I can rise at the chapel-bell, and dream that it rings for me. In moods of humility I can be a Sizar, or a Servitor. When the peacock vein rises, I strut a Gentleman Commoner. In graver moments, I proceed Master of Arts. Indeed I do not think I am much unlike that respectable character. I have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and bed-makers in spectacles, drop a bow or a curtsy, as I pass, wisely mistaking me for something of winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a the sort. I go about in black, which favours the notion. Only in Christ Church reverend quadrangle, I can be content to pass for nothing short of a Seraphic Doctor. The walks at these times are so much one's own, the tall trees of Christ's, the groves of Magdalen! The halls deserted, and with open doors inviting one to slip in unperceived, and pay a devoir to some Founder, or noble or royal Benefactress (that should have been ouis), whose portrait seems to smile upon their over-looked beadsman, and to adopt me for their own. Then, to take a peep in by the way at the butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique hospitality: the immense What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard. Still less have I curiosity to disturb the elder repose of MSS. Those variæ lectiones, so tempting to the more erudite palates, do but disturb and unsettle my faith. I am no Herculanean raker. The credit of the three witnesses might have slept unimpeached for me. I leave these curiosities to Porson, and to G. D.-whom, by the way, I found busy as • Januses of one face.-SIR THOMAS BROWNE. a moth over some rotten archive, rummaged effect of late studies and watchings at the out of some seldom-explored press, in a nook midnight oil) D. is the most absent of men. at Oriel. With long poring, he is grown He made a call the other morning at our almost into a book. He stood as passive as friend M.'s in Bedford-square; and, finding one by the side of the old shelves. I longed nobody at home, was ushered into the hall, to new coat him in russia, and assign him his where, asking for pen and ink, with great place. He might have mustered for a tall exactitude of purpose he enters me his name Scapula. in the book-which ordinarily lies about in such places, to record the failures of the untimely or unfortunate visitor-and takes his leave with many ceremonies and professions of regret. Some two or three hours after, his walking destinies returned him into the same neighbourhood again, and again the quiet image of the fire-side circle at M.'s— Mrs. M. presiding at it like a Queen Lar, with pretty A. S. at her side-striking irresistibly on his fancy, he makes another call (forgetting that they were "certainly not to return from the country before that day week"), and disappointed a second time, inquires for pen and paper as before: again the book is brought, and in the line just above that in which he is about to print his second name (his re-script)—his first name (scarce dry) looks out upon him like another Sosia, or as if a man should suddenly encounter his own duplicate! - The effect may be conceived. D. made many a good resolution against any such lapses in future. I hope he will not keep them too rigorously. D. is assiduous in his visits to these seats of learning. No inconsiderable portion of his moderate fortune, I apprehend, is consumed in journeys between them and Clifford's-inn-where, like a dove on the asp's nest, he has long taken up his unconscious abode, amid an incongruous assembly of attorneys, attorneys' clerks, apparitors, promoters, vermin of the law, among whom he sits "in calm and sinless peace." The fangs of the law pierce him not-the winds of litigation blow over his humble chambers-the hard sheriff's officer moves his hat as he passes-legal nor illegal discourtesy touches him-none thinks of offering violence or injustice to him-you would as soon "strike an abstract idea." D. has been engaged, he tells me, through a course of laborious years, in an investigation into all curious matter connected with the two Universities; and has lately lit upon a MS. collection of charters, relative to C—, by which he hopes to settle some disputed points-particularly that long controversy between them as to priority of foundation. The ardour with which he engages in these liberal pursuits, I am afraid, has not met with all the encouragement it deserved, either here, or at C. Your caputs, and heads of colleges, care less than anybody else about these questions.-Contented to suck the milky fountains of their Alma Maters, without inquiring into the venerable gentlewomen's years, they rather hold such curio- commonwealths "-devising some plan of sities to be impertinent-unreverend. They have their good glebe lands in manu, and care not much to rake into the title deeds. I gather at least so much from other sources, for D. is not a man to complain. D. started like an unbroke heifer, when I interrupted him. A priori it was not very probable that we should have met in Oriel. But D. would have done the same, had I accosted him on the sudden in his own walks in Clifford's-inn, or in the Temple. In addition to a provoking short-sightedness (the For with G.D.-to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak it profanely) to be present with the Lord. At the very time when, personally encountering thee, he passes on with no recognition—or, being stopped, starts like a thing surprised-at that moment, reader, he is on Mount Tabor -or Parnassus-or co-sphered with Platoor, with Harrington, framing "immortal amelioration to thy country, or thy species -peradventure meditating some individual kindness or courtesy, to be done to thee thyself, the returning consciousness of which made him to start so guiltily at thy obtruded personal presence. D. is delightful anywhere, but he is at the best in such places as these. He cares not much for Bath. He is out of his element at Buxton, at Scarborough, or Harrowgate. The Cam and the Isis are to him "better than all the waters of Damascus." On the Y |